After the rocking motion and engine noise of the boat, it was really good to have a quiet night in a proper bed. Even the call to prayer didn’t wake us! After breakfast we headed to the Peramatour office to have our flight reservations for the next day confirmed. After several phone calls, where it started to look doubtful, we were confirmed on the flight for the following morning.
Deciding that it would be a good idea to book some accommodation in Yogyakarta, Java before we arrived, we set out to find an internet café. The café that we did eventually find advertised the fastest internet in Lombok. All we can say is that the rest must be truly terrible. With a good deal of patience we eventually managed to book a nice sounding hotel in the Prawirotaman Road (the nice part) area of the city. With the hotel booked and the flights confirmed, we spent the rest of the day having massages (Debs that is), resting and repacking our bags ready for the morning.
Having been told that it would take about 30 minutes to the airport, we arranged a taxi for 6:30am, giving us plenty of time before our flight. In typical fashion the journey only took about 15 minutes, so we ended up with even more time to kill at the tiny Mataram airport. When our friends Brian & Pat had flown from West Timor, they had told us how they had been made to sit on the scales and be weighed before boarding the plane. When the same thing happened to us, it wasn’t quite the shock it might have been, but it was still very strange. Watching Debs slide about on the rollers on the scales was hilarious. How they got an accurate reading is beyond me! Safely weighed and informed that we were 4.5kg over (4.5kg over what?), the check-in staff let us go through. This weighing procedure wasn’t repeated on the other flights we took, so perhaps it is only on the short propeller powered flights.
Flying on a Fokker F50 was quite exciting as we hadn’t been on one before. Our flight carrier ‘Indonesian Air Transport’ didn’t sound too special, but the plane seemed to be brand new and the flight duration of only about 15 minutes didn’t give us a lot of time to be worried. Arriving on time at Denpasar airport, Bali we went to check our bags in for the onward flight to Yogyakarta. As we had arrived at 9:30am, we knew we had a reasonable wait until our flight left at 1pm. We weren’t quite prepared for being told that the flight had been delayed by 3 hours! To be fair to Garuda Air, we were all given a meal voucher for the restaurant, which is more than a lot of airlines would have done. In the end the time went fairly quickly, although we were going slightly stir crazy by the time we came to board. With no further delays we arrived in Yogyakarta airport after about an hour, retrieved our bags and went to meet our lift to the hotel.
Next: Yogyakarta
Deciding that it would be a good idea to book some accommodation in Yogyakarta, Java before we arrived, we set out to find an internet café. The café that we did eventually find advertised the fastest internet in Lombok. All we can say is that the rest must be truly terrible. With a good deal of patience we eventually managed to book a nice sounding hotel in the Prawirotaman Road (the nice part) area of the city. With the hotel booked and the flights confirmed, we spent the rest of the day having massages (Debs that is), resting and repacking our bags ready for the morning.
Having been told that it would take about 30 minutes to the airport, we arranged a taxi for 6:30am, giving us plenty of time before our flight. In typical fashion the journey only took about 15 minutes, so we ended up with even more time to kill at the tiny Mataram airport. When our friends Brian & Pat had flown from West Timor, they had told us how they had been made to sit on the scales and be weighed before boarding the plane. When the same thing happened to us, it wasn’t quite the shock it might have been, but it was still very strange. Watching Debs slide about on the rollers on the scales was hilarious. How they got an accurate reading is beyond me! Safely weighed and informed that we were 4.5kg over (4.5kg over what?), the check-in staff let us go through. This weighing procedure wasn’t repeated on the other flights we took, so perhaps it is only on the short propeller powered flights.
Flying on a Fokker F50 was quite exciting as we hadn’t been on one before. Our flight carrier ‘Indonesian Air Transport’ didn’t sound too special, but the plane seemed to be brand new and the flight duration of only about 15 minutes didn’t give us a lot of time to be worried. Arriving on time at Denpasar airport, Bali we went to check our bags in for the onward flight to Yogyakarta. As we had arrived at 9:30am, we knew we had a reasonable wait until our flight left at 1pm. We weren’t quite prepared for being told that the flight had been delayed by 3 hours! To be fair to Garuda Air, we were all given a meal voucher for the restaurant, which is more than a lot of airlines would have done. In the end the time went fairly quickly, although we were going slightly stir crazy by the time we came to board. With no further delays we arrived in Yogyakarta airport after about an hour, retrieved our bags and went to meet our lift to the hotel.
Next: Yogyakarta
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